176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



their going mad." There is a curious correspondence between this 

 recommendation of Pliny's and the following recipe for the " tear of a 

 mad hound," found in an old Anglo-Saxon leech-book, written about 

 the commencement of the eleventh century, entitled " Medicina de 

 Quadrupedibus : " "Take the worms (thymas) which be under a mad 

 hound's tongue (under thede hundes cunzan), snip them away, lead 

 them round about a tig-tree, give them to him who hath been rent; he 

 will soon be whole." 



Allusion is made to this worm in a woi'k called the " Kynosophian," 

 supposed by some to have been written by Phaemon, while others 

 attribute it to Demetrius Pepagomenos, a Greek writer residing at 

 Constantinople in the twelfth century. In this book it is asserted that 

 underneath the dog's tongue is a little body like a white worm, which 

 must be quickly destroyed ere it increase and invade the whole throat. 

 In the sixteenth century, Fracastorius, in a poem styled " Alcou, sive 

 de cura Canum Venaticorum," refers to it in the following words : 

 " Vulnificus vermis suffunditque ora veneno." 



In more modern times, the Germans generally believed in it, term- 

 ing it the Tollwurm, or worm of madness. So popular was the super- 

 stition, that, in the middle of the last century, there existed in Prus- 

 sia an ordinance requiring all owners of dogs to submit them to this 

 mutilation. The ordinance was rendered more specific by a royal de- 

 cree of February 20, 1767, establishing a regular corps of operators, 

 whose duty consisted in visiting semi-annually all houses containing 

 dogs, "worming" every animal, and furnishing the master thereof 

 with a certificate to that effect. The edict prescribed, likewise, that 

 every dog should be so treated before it had become six months old, 

 and persons violating the law were condemned to pay a fine of fifty 

 Prussian crowns, or, in default thereof, to suffer an imprisonment of 

 one month. In 1786 a similar law prevailed in Hanover. This so- 

 called worm was explained by some to be a vein, whose absence in a 

 dog menaced by hydrophobia leads to engorgement of the throat and 

 immediate asphyxia. It was regarded by Morgagni and Heydecker, 

 after careful examination, as a spiral tendinous arrangement peculiar 

 to the canine race, having some connection with the genio-hyo-glossus 

 muscle, and serving to facilitate the act of lapping. Other authori- 

 ties, however, deemed it to be the duct of the submaxillary gland, and 

 others still maintained that it was merely the frenum linguae. The 

 English author, Fothergill, in his celebrated treatise on Hydrophobia, 

 remarked that nothing was definitely settled relative to the utility of 

 the operation, but that the whitish vermiform substance thus removed 

 was nothing else, it might be presumed, than the canal forming a por- 

 tion of the salivary apparatus, whose destruction might possibly exer- 

 cise some influence upon the secretion, in diminishing, to a certain, ex- 

 tent, the liquid which transmits the virus. 



The whole theory, however, was substantially demolished in 1786, 



